Computex kicked off in Taipei this week and I've had three browser tabs open since Tuesday just refreshing liveblogs like a lunatic. Intel and AMD both used their press conferences to basically start flexing core counts at each other, and it's the most fun I've had following hardware news in a couple years.
Intel went first, on Monday, and showed off the new Core X-series lineup: this is the Skylake-X stuff that's going to replace the old X99 platform. The headline part is a Core i9 tier sitting above the regular i7 Extreme Edition parts, and the top-end chip in that family is an 18-core, 36-thread monster. Eighteen cores. On a desktop chip you could theoretically buy and put in a normal tower case. No pricing yet, which, fine, but I'd bet real money it's not going to be what anyone calls "affordable."
Then AMD's keynote happened Tuesday and it was somehow even more of a spectacle. Someone from AMD walked out holding a CPU that's visibly, physically bigger than a normal Ryzen chip — because it is, Threadripper is basically two Ryzen dies fused onto one package — and said it'll ship with up to 16 cores and 32 threads. They didn't give a firm release date beyond "later this year," and no price either, but just seeing the thing held up on stage, next to a regular Ryzen 7 for scale, was kind of a wild moment. It looked like someone had photoshopped a chip to be too big and then just, didn't fix it.
I want to be honest about something: I built my current desktop about 14 months ago and I was pretty happy with it right up until about 48 hours ago. It's a quad-core i5. Four cores felt totally reasonable in early 2016. Watching two companies casually toss around 16 and 18 core numbers on the same week makes my machine feel like it belongs in a museum next to a beige box running Windows 98. I know, I know, nobody actually needs 18 cores for browsing Reddit and occasionally editing video. This is not a rational feeling. I'm having it anyway.
What I actually think is going on here is more interesting than "line go up." For years the desktop CPU market has been kind of boring, Intel had basically no real competition after Bulldozer flopped, and we all just got incremental 5-10% gains generation after generation while paying more for the privilege. Ryzen landed back in March and actually put real pressure on Intel for the first time in what feels like forever, and now four months later we're watching both companies race straight to the high end because that's apparently the fastest way to look like the winner going into Computex week. I'm not complaining. This is exactly the dynamic that's supposed to happen and it took entirely too long to get here.
The part nobody's really talking about yet is who this is even for. Content creators doing video encoding, sure, that's a real workload that eats cores for breakfast. Some devs running huge compile jobs. But the actual gaming benefit of going past 6 or 8 cores is still pretty marginal for most titles in 2017, and these chips are clearly going to carry a price tag that reflects "look what we can do" more than "here's a sensible upgrade path." I'd love to be wrong about that. I doubt I will be.
Also, small tangent, but I think it's funny that both companies are announcing chips that won't actually ship for months. Intel's Core i9 stuff isn't landing until later this summer at the earliest, Threadripper's aiming for something like August. Computex has turned into this weird theater where the products on stage this week are really just proof-of-concept flexing for a launch that's still ten or twelve weeks out. Everyone in the comments sections is already arguing about benchmarks that don't exist yet for hardware nobody can buy. I get why (it builds hype and keeps people from jumping to the competitor in the meantime), but it does make the whole week feel a little bit like theater.
Anyway. I'm not upgrading anything for a while, my i5 still opens Chrome fine, but I'll admit I've had a pricing page bookmarked since Tuesday morning just in case something changes my mind before August.